Sea Flooding Overlaid On Old Gas Station Maps Is Petrol Propaganda In Reverse

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Carlton Reid is a U.K.-based journalist covering sustainability.

Seattle-based artist and cartographer Jeffrey Linn scours the globe for old gas station maps and turns them into visualizations of what a warming world will look like someday, with coastal areas and river plains flooded thanks to vanishing polar ice caps and glaciers. Linn’s reimagined “petrofuture” maps, reworked from those issued by oil companies to encourage profligate car use, show what unrestrained fossil fuel burning creates: a world underwater.

Linn publishes the updated maps on his Conspiracy of Cartographers website.

Sea level rise maps generally aim to educate viewers about the real-world consequences of a warmed planet, but Linn’s use of period gas station maps also deftly points the finger of blame at oil conglomerates. His reworked period maps retain corporate logos from the likes of Shell and Esso but also include his own to keep lawyers from his door.

“An IP attorney told me that if I add my own logo then the maps become editorial works, which is protected. Parody is protected in ways that plain copying isn’t,” Linn told me on the eve of Earth Day.

The Petrofuture series, Linn’s website explains, “is an attempt to reimagine our memories, to alter the tropes of our nostalgia.” By re-branding, re-titling, and editing the maps to show the maximum level of sea rise when the ice caps melt, these maps, adds the site, “take on the promotions of petro-corporations and turn them back on themselves, depicting the ultimate consequences of car culture and fossil fuels.”

Using scanned vintage gas station maps as a base, Linn adds 66 meters of sea level rise, the highest predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) if all of the world’s ice sheets melt. This could take thousands of years, but the inundation is already noticeable and could flood the lowest-lying areas within decades.

“These maps were given away free at gas stations. They were essentially advertising, which is a form of propaganda, so my maps are anti-propaganda,” says Linn. “Petrol corporations spend billions today telling us they care about the environment, and this is my small way of counteracting that, using nostalgia to point out their greenwashing.”

Linn digitizes the maps in his basement studio and uses Geographic Information System (GIS) software to overlay spatial information, enabling the accurate plotting of IPCC sea level rise predictions.

“I use a digital elevation model and select the elevations above 66 meters,” he adds. Everything below that will be flooded, according to IPCC predictions, so his maps show those areas as underwater, with what’s land today shown as a faded layer.

“I don’t exaggerate things,” he stresses. “I let the water go where the water will go.”

His maps show that central Seattle and Vancouver will become island chains. He imagines car-addled Los Angeles as the Bay of LA, with water covering the plains and stretching to the mountains. Aside from the peak of Staten Island, New York disappears. Boston goes glug-glug while the city’s western suburbs become archipelagos.

Most of his found maps are North American in origin, but oil companies also gave away gas station maps in Europe, too, so Linn has produced Petrofuture maps showing London and Paris as unrecognizably flooded, with today’s hills shown as isolated islands.

Climate science bodies such as Climate Central use sea level rise maps as part of their campaigning. The nonprofit warns that within just 25 years, areas of the U.K. most likely to be underwater include London’s River Thames area and large areas of the Lincolnshire and Norfolk coast, into Cambridgeshire. Climate Central’s Coastal Risk Screening Tool also shows the risk of inundation for large areas around the Humber Estuary in Northern England.

Climate Central’s latest update to the model, included in its ‘Flooded Future: Global vulnerability to sea level rise worse than previously understood’ report, suggests that globally, by 2050, land that’s currently home to 300 million people will fall below the elevation of an average annual coastal flood and, by 2100, land now home to 200 million people could sit permanently below the high tide line.

According to experts, changing our behavior to minimize our carbon footprint and focusing on meeting climate targets is the only way to minimize the damage to the planet, reduce global warming, and reduce the risk of disappearing beneath the waves. Leading ice scientist Richard Alley believes a 15-20-foot rise this century is possible, and even conservative estimates put the increase to somewhere between three to six feet. Ocean surfaces are five to eight inches higher now than in 1900. The rate of increase averaged one-sixteenth of an inch (1.7mm) over the 20th Century, but by 2016, it had hit a rate of 3.4mm, or double the 20th Century average. (Donald Trump was wrong when, in August last year, he told Elon Musk that “the ocean’s going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years.”)

“These estimates are difficult for people to grapple with,” believes Linn, who produces transit maps as his day job. “Most people have a hard time seeing beyond the tips of their own noses and don’t think about the world beyond their lifetime.”

He says the IPCC’s predictions might be thousands of years into the future, but they could also come true much sooner than that.

“We may not be able to think about the world in thousands of years, but we can imagine the Tudor period as that’s just 450 years ago. Major flooding of the world could happen in that sort of timescale.”

“I’m a cartographer, not a climate scientist,” he adds, “so I can’t argue about when the inundation will happen but I know we’ve seen a spike in the rate of warming recently, and there are a lot of unknowns that even people who should know don’t know.”

His maps, he says, are polemical. “This is sea level rise brought to you by Shell. This is sea level rise brought to you by Esso.”

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